THE OPPORTUNITY

This was the second year that CBR Marketing provided digital marketing services for Bidvest Waltons Back To School. Unlike with the preceding campaign, we still needed to consider the impact of COVID-19 on this campaign, even though there was less of an impact on schools at the time in terms of their opening dates.

OUR STRATEGY & EXECUTION

User-experience learnings from the previous campaign were considered to give website visitors the best shopping experience possible, such as allowing them to upload their shopping lists to backtoschool.co.za. Our campaign rolled out on Facebook, Instagram, Google Display, Google Search and Google Shopping, and targeted remarketing lists, interests, topics, and people searching for Bidvest Waltons products. It was important for us to develop content and design for each part of our funnel and drive the relevant digital KPIs, which were used to drive website sales.

RESULTS

Through this agile and data-driven approach, the Back To School campaign achieved an average return on ad spend of 2 280%, which is 2.4 times more than our previous campaign. Bidvest Waltons achieved a year-on-year increase in e-commerce revenue of around 50%. Digital advertising for the campaign generated 44% of total website purchases, with an average website conversion rate of 3%.

Google Ads performed well with Shopping ads, which generated a 6,687% return on ad spend. The average cost per order for digital advertising decreased by 56%, which assisted with the overall 50% growth in e-commerce orders.